A Check-In With My 37-Year-Old Self
Twenty years on, I revisit a list of goals I set for myself, to see how I'm doing.
I’m an accountant. Accountants exist to measure things. Year-end inventories, financial statements, actual results against forecasts, growth and increase, loss and decrease. I also love to trade stocks and obsessively watch the upward arrow of time for the Nasdaq and S&P Index.
So, here I am today, measuring myself against the woman who put a life plan in place many years ago: me at the age of 37. OK, it wasn’t actually a life plan, it was a list of desires with the intent to lift myself out of a dark place.
At the end of 2001, I was struggling. A newly divorced single parent, I was trying to rebuild my life and figure out who I was and where I was going. I wrote in my journal, Please God, I beg you to make my life better this year. Help me let go of my burdens and please don’t give me any crises this year. I don’t feel able to handle them.
I had survived 2001, but I wanted to thrive. It was especially hard because I was a member of a church who did not believe in remarriage. I thought my life was over. I had 13 more years of child raising, and then what? I felt trapped and hopeless. When I told my therapist I was suffocating, she told me to set some goals.
So I bought a book by Henriette Anne Klauser, Write it Down, Make it Happen. Knowing What You Want – And Getting It. It was a first step to refigure myself out after a decade of marriage and trying to support my husband in doing what he wanted.
This book, and another I remember as yellow, with a memo pad on the front cover (that I can’t find in my personal library), and their exercises had a powerful impact on my life. As I told my best friend at the time, “I’m a full-grown woman with many decisions to make. These decisions will set me on a path which is the scariest part. The destination is unknown, but I’ll try (I crossed these two words out in my journal) I’ll have a lot of fun getting there.”
In those days, people didn’t use the phrase, living with intention. Klauser’s book essentially said, by writing down your goals or dreams, they have a magic way of happening. Two decades later, I would have to say, it’s true.
In January 2002, I wrote down a list of 68 things I would like to accomplish in my life if time and money were no object. Every five to ten years, I revisit that list, to check in and see how I’m doing. I laugh at some of the goals now – like having three more kids, and some achievements didn’t work out as expected. Owning a sports car turned out to be overrated.
Some goals I may struggle to attain all my life because they are the hardest things for me to overcome, like getting up early. Some were fantasies that were never going to happen, like being a stay-at-home mom when I was a single, working mom. And some, I look at and say, wow this is just plain crazy – because the magic is happening right now! Like having tickets to the Paris Summer Olympics. Some I realize, just need a bit more time, and maybe, this year some intentional focus.
So, here’s some of the stuff from 37-year-old Janell’s list:
Goal #1 – To write a best-selling novel. Frustrating that the first item on my list is not yet accomplished. Problem is, I didn’t make a goal to actually write a novel. That was a mistake. First, you have to have the goods and something to write about. That didn’t come for a long time. I’m much humbler now. Now, I just want to publish my novel. To attain this goal, there were and are many subgoals, like learning the craft of writing, practicing, practicing, practicing. And writing about 500 rewrites. But in 2023, I had a finished, edited manuscript, so all is not lost – I am on track for the publishing part.
Goal #54 – To write a novel exploring society’s ills, a la Charles Dickens. When I wrote this goal, I had no idea what to write about, and yet, I look back now and see that it was entirely with intention that I set out to write a novel about working women and the price they pay to succeed – and that I’m writing a memoir about adoption. All because I wrote that purpose into existence in Goal #54!
Goals #2/#14/#33/#35/#43/#44 – To live in a beautiful house by the beach. To live in a small, sophisticated town. To have a house with a wraparound porch. To have a garden with fruit trees and flowers. To live in a place without traffic. I have check-ins through the years that say, living in a beautiful house ten miles from the beach, living in a marina right on the water (Dubai), and today, I live two miles from the beach and can drive past it every day if I choose. My town is small, but I have to say it celebrates cowboy history, which doesn’t quite meet my tastes for sophistication. On the other hand, it is a historic town, has a community theatre, and it’s getting a reputation as a foodie town. Maybe I will have a part one day in making it a center of art and literary culture.
I’ve got a front balcony, a side overhang and a pergola in the back. With the help of a gardener, my lot has 9 fruit trees and flowers everywhere. Nineteen years after I wrote that goal, I totally killed it. This did not come easily, but now seems like magic. I’ve made many moves in my life, spent a year looking for a house in Southern California, then enlisted my niece and her real estate agent partner - who still had to take me to seventeen houses to find The One. Many people might disagree with the not much traffic concept of this town, but since I live right in the middle of it and can walk wherever I need to go, it’s true for me.
Goal #5 – To have three more children. OK – that was funny, because after I adopted my son and had a 17-year-old and an 8-year-old in the house, I realized I would have had rocks in my head to want four kids as a single mom. BUT WAIT – I did have two more kids! While my daughter attended high school, I was a host mom to a student from China and another from Austria. Goal accomplished.
Goal #9 – To work out of my house. I don’t remember having this goal, but to be an author, you kind of need to work from home. Covid made it happen.
Goal #65 – To visit my birth father’s grave. Check.
Travel goals – I had goals to visit every country in western Europe, to visit Canada, Australia, to go white water rafting, to go on a camping/hiking trip, to bike across America. I spent twenty years working in a job that let me travel all over the world. I have journeyed to almost every continent, visited most countries in Western Europe. I biked Victoria Island in Canada and went white water rafting on the same trip, did a camping hiking trip to Machu Pichu in Peru. I biked North to South Vietnam, through Cambodia to Thailand. But not across America – that goal might need to be in another lifetime.
Now, if life were just a checklist to tick off boxes, to say I’ve been here, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, it would feel like an soulless merry-go-round of achievement. But my list covered goals on things that I struggle with every single day.
Like health – To eat out less, to eat healthy, to lose weight, to have a sculpted body, to lift weights, to have healthy heels. I don’t think I ate a single meal cooked from home this week, but I do have a personal trainer and a nutritionist right now, and I’m working on these goals. Again.
And then, the really important ones.
To not feel alone.
To be happy. To believe that I’m lucky. To love myself.
These are the hardest goals for me. It took years to even hear the abusive inner voice that told me what an awful person I was, to perceive how filled guilt, shame and self-hatred I was.
It will take daily work to find joy – happiness unfettered by grief and loss – in my existence. I have learned for myself that creating beauty, taking hard words and concepts like adoption, grief and family trauma, and turning them into poetry, is what makes me heal, become the real me.
Having raspberry walls, a Christmas tree decorated in pink, a rose-colored coat and a dog who wears a purple sweater when walking about town doesn’t hurt.
What do I want to say to the Janell from two decades ago? I want to thank her for her intentions, for the life journey she led me on. She taught me that to thrive, you must strive, push yourself past your fears and worries, your reluctant self. I want to make that younger Janell proud by continuing to work on the hardest, most illusive goals.
The Janell of today has also laid aside goals that no longer suit her. Like retiring at 50. Obviously, that didn’t happen. I don’t want to retire yet and that’s okay.
Or like learning how to ski. Let’s face it – I don’t like the cold, don’t want to find myself sinking into icy wetness, have no desire to hurtle down a mountain toward a tree without being able to stop myself. And that’s okay, too.
The Janell of today has some of her own goals. Like learning how to dance. Finding her inner colors/outer look. Executing plans laid in 2023. Getting her book into the world.
Picking a theme for 2024. Believe? Get out of my own way? Watch it happen?
To get to this Janell, I’ve had to revisit/refocus myself many times. To learn about the barriers I place on myself, like reading The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield, to make new habits, which I did through completing Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity; to understand the parts of me through the development of a personal brand. It’s a continual push/ pull because life happens and I don’t want to miss any part of what I’m meant to learn right here, right now, in the present. And I get distracted by focusing on the good for me or my family, and not on the best for me.
What I never do is set out to accomplish a specific goal on that 68-point list from 2001. It stays in its journal on a bookshelf, to be pulled out from time to time to reflect on the seemingly effortless way in which things happen.
I don’t have the word for 2024’s theme yet, but I do know that living with intention and writing goals down, even on slips of paper placed into sealed envelopes, sets off a quiver in the universe that brings a whole world into existence.
The accountant in me is pleased. That arrow of results has gone up and down as the days pass, sometimes way down, but over time it’s up – way up. I say to that younger self, some days are far from perfect, but I am growing and thriving.